Immelt replied with an all-encompassing picture of the internet
[emphasis ours]:

"This may be one of the most important things that your investors
can think about. There's a lot of buzzwords out there, the
internet of things, industrial internet. Here's what I would tell
the people watching your show.

A locomotive today is a rolling data center. An aircraft engine
is a flying data center. This is producing terabytes of data
every day. This data can be used to give back to customers, to
drive fuel-efficiency, better performance, better environmental
performance. We can take the same technology and do it in our
plants. So every investor of an industrial company
ought to understand what their internet strategy is.

GE coined the term "industrial intenet" in
2012, giving a name to its massive push into the digital
space. The multinational giant began developing ways to integrate
equipment sensors, artificial-intelligence technology, and data
software with their industrial equipment.

The technology, in turn, feeds real-time data to the
equipment's owners, which leads to mean higher efficiency and
productivity.

We've already been doing this for five years, so I think we have
a leadership position. But Jim, I don't have to tell you, if you
go back 15 years, trillions of dollars of wealth have been
created in industrial internet stocks over the last 15 years.
If you look out ten or 15 years, there's going to be
trillions of dollars of wealth created in the industrial
internet, and we're just in the first inning.

And I want GE to get its fair share of that. So, maybe we think
of ourselves or people think of ourselves as an old industrial
company. Those days are over. We think this is a
place we can play. And we're participating in multiple ways. So
investors don't have to understand everything about it, but ask
questions about it. But for us, higher margins, faster growth.
Participate from a value standpoint the way that value is created
on the consumer internet over the past five, ten, 15 years. We
think this is possible for GE.